Telecommunication and cable companies offer to their subscribers a bundle of high-speed data services. These services typically include a bundle of TV broadcasting, Internet, and telephone. With this aim, telecommunication companies implement high-speed optical networks. An example for such a network is the Gigabit PON (GPON) currently being adopted by many telecommunication companies in order to deliver high-speed data services to their subscribers.
To provide bundled high-speed data services a residential gateway is installed in the premises. Generally, a residential gateway may provide the functionality of a modem and router and may be, for example, a cable modem, a router, a switch, a wireless modem, a wireless router, and so on. The residential gateway may be connected to a network unit, e.g., an optical network unit (ONU) or integrated with the network unit. An example of a GPON residential gateway that is capable of processing GPON traffic and perform residential tasks can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 7,801,161 entitle “Gigabit passive optical network (GPON) residential gateway,” assigned to the common assignee of the present application, and which is hereby incorporated for all that it contains.
As mentioned above, one of the tasks of a residential gateway is to support wireless local area network (WLAN) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard family (also known as “Wi-Fi”). There are two types of Wi-Fi stacks, a soft-MAC and a hard-MAC. A protocol stack is a particular software implementation of a computer networking protocol (e.g., IEEE 802.11) suite. In a soft-MAC, the code is executed by the host processor, thus heavily consumes valuable processing resources. The alternative is the hard-MAC in which a dedicated processor runs the entire Wi-Fi stack's code, thus freeing the host processor to perform other network tasks. However, the disadvantage of the hard-MAC is an additional cost.
Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as laptop computers are equipped with relatively powerful processors and large amounts of memory, thus soft-MAC implementation is feasible without degrading the overall performance. However, in residential gateways, the computing power of the host processor is limited. Thus, full implementation of a Wi-Fi soft-MAC in a residential gateway will increase the utilization of the host processor and degrade the performance of the device. On the other hand, implementation of a Wi-Fi hard-MAC is not a desired solution as it would require designing residential gateways with a dedicate processor, thereby increasing the cost of such devices.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an efficient solution for Wi-Fi acceleration in residential gateways.